Real Responsibilities | #2

At the start of my internship, I knew I was going to have some big responsibilities, but now that I am reflecting on my beginning expectations, I am surprised with just how real those responsibilities are. I have four main realms of responsibilities.

The first is “Web and Ads.” Not only am I responsible for analyzing our online job posting data to find trends, something I expected to be responsible for, but I am also in charge of making the final decision of where to post job ads for some of our state director positions. Most of the ads cost money to post, so I did not expect to be involved in the decision making process for those, but I have taken the responsibility seriously and I backup my decisions with the data I have analyzed.

My second realm is “The Reporting Document.” In the recruiting department, we have one main Google Sheet that every team uses to keep track of their recruiting goals and actuals. I was responsible with creating a new reporting document for our newest recruiting drive, and I am currently responsible for updating the numbers and making sure this entire document runs without a hitch. I have gained a lot of experiential knowledge on Excel and Google Sheets from this responsibility, and I have more confidence after being trusted to maintain a document with such importance to the daily operations of our department.

My third realm, “Candidates,” is straight forward and repetitive, but still very important to our operation. I have a list of senior level positions that we are hiring for, and I am in charge of keeping track of the candidates that have already applied for those positions, and calling them to keep them moving in our process.

My final responsibility is of “Online Organizing.” This is the biggest responsibility I have, and it consists of two parts: writing emails, and planning. With regards to writing emails, I have already written emails to be sent to our Listservs that highlight some of our open positions, and my manager said she loved them. I am also updating the automatic emails that get sent to candidates at every stage of their process (i.e. initial interest, filling out an application, scheduling an interview, accept, regret). The bigger part of the Online Organizing realm is creating a plan for the entire recruiting department for the 2019 recruiting year (RY19). I have not started on this yet, but I will need to plan goals and set a timeline for the recruiting team to follow from September 2018 to August 2019.

There is a stereotype that internships involve a lot of paper pushing, but my experience at The Public Interest Network has been anything but that.